(UN Food and Agriculture Organization) Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an approach that helps to guide actions needed to transform and reorient agricultural systems to effectively support development and ensure food security in a changing climate. CSA aims to tackle three main objectives: sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes; adapting and building resilience to climate change; and reducing and/or removing greenhouse gas emissions, where possible.

CSA is an approach for developing agricultural strategies to secure sustainable food security under climate change. CSA provides the means to help stakeholders from local to national and international levels identify agricultural strategies suitable to their local conditions. CSA is one of the 11 Corporate Areas for Resource Mobilization under the FAO’s Strategic Objectives. It is in line with FAO’s vision for Sustainable Food and Agriculture and supports FAO’s goal to make agriculture, forestry and fisheries more productive and more sustainable”. READ MORE

“Agriculture is one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters, but it is also one of the climate’s greatest allies,” says Rima Al-Azar, FAO Global Climate Governance coordinator and Climate Smart Agriculture team leader. “The agriculture sector can play a large role in mitigation by reducing emissions and avoiding further loss of carbon stored in forests and soil. Keeping soils and forests healthy also helps fight climate change as both of these act as ‘sinks’ that sequester carbon.

“Lastly,” Al-Azar said, “reducing food loss and waste and advocating for better food consumption patterns are other important efforts within agriculture’s sphere of influence.”

Officials say more than three-quarters of the world’s poor live in rural areas and many of them depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. CSA, which is an approach that helps to transform and reorient agricultural systems to ensure food security and support rural development in a changing climate, focuses on the farmer, fisher or herder.

“It is these rural people, particularly in developing countries, who are hit the hardest by climate change,” Al-Azar said. “Our agricultural and food systems are bearing the brunt of higher temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, rising sea levels and more frequent extreme weather events. ”

The five case studies detailed in the publication demonstrate successful FAO initiatives to benefit farming communities and work towards one of the UN’s global sustainable development goals – combatting climate change and its impacts.

Climate work cited in the case studies include the “re-greening” of the Sahel region of Africa, the stemming of flooding in Bangladesh, efforts to promote greater indigenous pig production in the western Balkans, climate-smart mussel farming in Chile, and an FAO initiative to bring together government efforts in the Near East and North Africa (NENA) to end severe shortages of water.

The outcomes of these climate-smart projects have created a better understanding of the potential accelerators and barriers for the adoption of this type of agriculture, the FAO says.

Table of contents:

AFRICA
Climate-smart landscape-level planning in Burundi
The “re-greening” of the Sahel for farmers in Burkina Faso and Niger
Assessing the role of livestock in building resilience to climate change in Zambia

ASIA & THE PACIFIC
Sloping Agricultural Land Technology in coconut-farming communities in the Philippines affected by Typhoon Haiyan
Floating gardens: the Climate-Smart Agriculture production system in Bangladesh